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AC/DC: Are they all that?

Stretch here. Stop the gushing please. Journalists beware; look at each other’s reviews of Black Ice. How many of you have mentioned that rock appears a lot in song titles? How many of you point out that AC/DC have never reinvented themselves? They didn’t need to, did they? No, no concept albums, no style changes. They have remained their dumb selves since the beginning. I read today a statement pondering what kind of guitarist Angus Young could have been had he tried harder. Murderous feelings in my netherwellregions.

Simply: AC/DC fans will have no problem with anything AC/DC have ever done or tried to do, and that’s perfectly fine. Kudos dudos. For everyone else though, stop trying this revivalist crap. Every article I have read has said pretty much the same thing (No style change after all these years and the anti-iTunes stuff). Fair enough, but just coz you’re a filthy journalists with no imagination doesn’t mean you can spout off some generalised sick about the band.

Angus Young is a great guitarist, as is Malcolm Young. Some of the riffs that have come from AC/DC are iconic. I mean look at the songs “Hell’s Bells,” “Highway to Hell” and of course “Whole Lotta Rosie.” The Edge (stoopid, stoopid Edge) and Mark Knopfler have been mentioned as great guitarists and they are, but they haven’t really changed their style from the start.

I’m not an AC/DC fan. In fact some of their content makes me really pissy, REALLY PISSY. “Heatseeker” pisses me off. “Thunderstruck” was a staple song wedged into small Irish discos in the early 1990s and even now it reminds me of stale sweat and Lynx deodorant, dirty women and their rotten husbands whooping it up in horrible weddings when men with sweaty-groined trousers and women whose hairstylists were accidentally making them look like Ian McCullough in a pant suit shook their heads from side to side and danced in a small twelve inch area. Guys in pastel short sleeved shirts were trying to cop a feel from women wearing some kind of linedancing uniform and all I could think of was how to sterilise these fuckers before they could actually conceive horrible monsters right there on the dance floor. These disastrous children; mutant crossings of Haddaway and Angus Young, with a penchant for Bulmers, getting sick and hating black people. I was young, I couldn’t have stopped it happening. And now I hear these fuckwitted journalists gushing about AC/DC as if they are legends for everyone, not just metal fans. It’s the same rubbish you hear every time they talk about Thin Lizzy. I love Phil Lynott, but I’m not dumb enough to believe that everything Lizzy did was genius. A lot of it was utter shit.

Anyway, listen to all of AC/DC’s back catalogue before you make your mind up. To me, half of their output makes me want to jump to the dance floor in ridiculous Footloose-type spasms but the other half leaves me incredibly bored and disappointed. When it works, nobody is better, when it doesn’t it is Rock’n’roll by numbers. Toss it into a handkerchief, because that’s all that it is. Generalising these guys’ material is stupid. What they do is important for a whole bunch of people, but it’s nothing to with you rock journalist. Coldplay, that’s your scene. That’s what you get. You fucking blowjobs.